Young and Old

On their second LP, Tennis take the Brill Building tunefulness and classic indie-pop production values of their debut and add a bit of rock'n'roll muscle. Patrick Carney of Black Keys produces.

The title of Tennis' second album could almost as easily describe the first. The music on last year's Cape Dory bobbed sweetly between Brill Building tunefulness and classic indie pop production values, and the basic lyrical themes were at least as old as jazz standard "A Sailboat in the Moonlight", hold the moonlight. But the sailing trip that inspired the Colorado-based band's debut also fulfilled something newer: the internet's need for easily digestible narrative. Luckily, core married couple Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley had a real knack for breezy, deceptively simple beach-pop that could get lodged in your head and inspire your own seafaring daydreams. Or at least make you jealous.

Another story would seem to apply to Young and Old, and it's the one about the "difficult" sophomore record. Musically, Tennis have broadened their horizons just the right amount, adding rock'n'roll muscle and a more purely pop clarity under the oversight of the Black Keys' drummer Patrick Carney, who produced. A few songs still hit at the sense of love-drunk reverie that turned older tracks like "Marathon" and "South Carolina" into blog and college-radio hits. But Tennis couldn't keep writing sailing songs forever, and the new batch doesn't pull us into their world quite as easily-- and it's not only for lack of convenient biographical shorthand. They've gone from under the boardwalk to stuck in the middle.

For all that, a whole lot of what's new here improves on the debut. Under Carney's direction, Tennis upgrade their sonics without losing the fuzz. In fact, sometimes there's even more fuzz, such as in the nicely clanging lead riff on the album's first advance mp3, sprightly piano-popper "Origins". Moore's full-throated lilt and multi-hued keyboard, along with Riley's lissome guitar lines, still aren't that far down the innocent coast from Beach House's supine dream-pop, and now there are extra layers of vocal harmonies, such as the appealingly Free Design-jazzy sha-la-las on "Petition". But Carney especially brings life to the percussion, whether it's the huge handclaps on "My Better Self", a swooning standout reminiscent of the Owls' underrated mid-2000s indie-pop gem "Air", or the snapping snares on "High Road".

"Paradise is all around, but happiness is never found," Moore sings on that last song, which might've been a strong unifying theme for the sophomore album-- a melancholy flipside to the debut's paradise-is-paradise uplift. Sure, the songs on Young and Old occasionally bring back the romance of movement (optimistic "Traveling"), and they're often introspective, but instead the effect tends to be too confused, stilted, or generic to really pack the same wallop. The album's first words, on mellow strummer "It All Feels the Same", are "took a train," a potentially intriguing counterpart to sailing that isn't properly explored elsewhere on the record. Rather than at sea or on the railroad, the lyrics lean toward awkward abstraction: "Will you make my children bear the consequences everywhere?" asks "Origins". Even on "My Better Self", Moore philosophizes clumsily, "What is innate, I do not know/ But meaning comes and it goes."

She sort of has a point, though. As easy as it is to criticize acts that come to us with a ready-built narrative alongside their music, storytelling and image-making have always been crucial elements of pop. What matters isn't whether a record comes with extra-musical buzz attached, but whether the music is good enough to capitalize on that buzz. Cape Dory, to my ears, was; Young and Old is another example of a promising young act that found an audience quickly on the internet before fully coming into its own powers. In other words, it's pretty good, but also a bit disappointing. There's still plenty of time, though, and by album three, the duo that never originally set out to make music will have something else that can be invaluable for a working band: a little more experience in the trenches.